The subject application relates to computerized tomography (CT) imaging. In particular, new and improved CT imaging systems are presented which improve the ability to use CT imaging on the breast, e.g., for diagnostic, biopsy, and cancer screening applications.
Example improvements disclosed herein include. The improved CT systems presented herein have many uses across a number of different settings.
Breast cancer is the most common diagnosed cancer among women worldwide. 1 in 8 women will acquire breast cancer in their lifetime. While the death rate has been declining since the 1990's due to screening, early detection, and early treatment, the death rate is still high. 40,000 women died last year in the USA due to breast cancer.
However, breast cancer screening still is still lacking in quality and efficacy. In particular, current cancer screening techniques result in a great number of false positives, and false negatives (in fact, a recent study showed that $4.8B was wasted last year in the USA on false positives and the cost of life is much greater on the false negative front).
One of the main reasons for these deficiencies is that conventional breast cancer screening technologies still utilize 2D imaging. Thus, traditional mammography requires that the breast (a 3D object) be painfully compressed using what essentially amounts to a vice to render it more two dimensional so as to conform to 2D x-ray imaging standards. Beyond obvious discomfort (which can lead, inter alia, to reduced patient compliance) such compression can often result in reduced image reliability, quality and coverage. These deficiencies are particularly evident for women with smaller/denser breasts which can be extremely difficult to image using conventional mammography techniques. Ironically, woman with smaller/denser breasts are already at greater risk with a much higher incidence of cancer.
Thus, there are significant advantages to developing technologies which would enable 3D type scanning of the preset. Unfortunately, traditional 3D scanning machines like MM and CT have lacked the high spatial resolution to see the smallest malignancies.
Devising an effective and accurate breast CT system is not as simple as it sounds. There are several major problems, which a designer must deal with. First is that ordinarily cone beam CT, whereby a transmission trajectory is made around an object in one plane, is plagued by the fact that all tissue does not get irradiated the same, nor spatial sampled/reconstructed the same. This means that lesions in different parts of the field of view will be imaged with much different accuracy. A second problem is in physically rotating in a coronal plane around one breast, but yet getting deep enough to image the breast to the chest wall. This compounded by the fact that patients come in many different sizes. It is not good enough to scan the majority of the breast while omitting the chest wall as many suspicious and malignant lesions are found there. It is not good enough to only be able to scan 50% of the population. An effective product should be able to scan up to 95% or greater of the population.
The subject application relates to U.S. Pat. No. 7,609,808 to Martin P. Tornai et al., entitled “Application specific emission and transmission tomography” and issued Oct. 27, 2009, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. In particular Tornai teaches a compact and mobile gantry for 3-dimensional imaging of the breast. In Tornai, the imaging device is mounted to a support so as to be selectively movable during imaging in three dimensions, including radial movement relative to a rotation axis, rotational movement about the rotation axis, vertical movement parallel to the rotation axis, and pivoting movement about a pivot axis perpendicular to said rotation axis.
While the imaging device disclosed in Tornai represents some advancement in the optimization and specialization of a 3D type imaging system for the breast, in many ways it is limited by its overly complex and unrefined design intended more as a proof of concept than a viable commercial product. Thus there remains a need for a 3D type imaging system for the breast that can improve upon the initial Tornai design. These and other needs are addressed by way of the present disclosure.